Our latest blog post is aimed at people who ‘get it’ about online privacy, but who struggle to convince friends and family to take it seriously. We hope it helps!
Our latest blog post is aimed at people who ‘get it’ about online privacy, but who struggle to convince friends and family to take it seriously. We hope it helps!
Not seeing ads is really convenient, and I have trouble understanding why anyone wouldn’t block ads aggressively on every device they spend much time using in 2025.
To cover a couple common objections:
Then it’s the institution’s IT department I’m puzzled by. If I was running corporate IT, ad blocking would be part of the standard install. The FBI recommends it for security.
Why would you buy such a device, or continue using it now that you know better?
Money. The economy is tight right now, and many people don’t have the money to change devices because of what, sadly, amounts to a single flaw. If it does 99% of what you need/want, many people are willing to trade off what they see as the 1% they don’t like.
I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m just making sure you and others understand that this isn’t a question without a good answer. I would be happier with devices that are more under my control, but money is the main limiting factor.
Right, I do understand that’s a limitation. I think I’m more puzzled that many people find the presence of ads in a device they paid for to be a minor issue rather than intolerable.
It’s like living on a busy road. People adjust, while life degrades.
I don’t know how old you are, so I’ll just have to state my experience here. I’ll liken it to television, because with the way Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc., have become some of the most visited sites on the Internet, it’s likely that people are using a lot of these devices like TVs.
Commercials have been part of TV since the beginning. First it was sponsorships (if you watch old shows, you’ll find sponsor segments not dissimilar to modern YouTube), then slowly we transitioned into commercial breaks. Then we started doing both - product placements being the biggest ones, but also some shows that still had sponsors. Game shows and news shows are notable for this. If you wanted to avoid commercials, you either timeshifted (VCR, DVR, etc), or you watched PBS - except that PBS has not only their begathons, but for the last 30 years has had what amount to sponsorships and commercials between programs.
And when you got the opportunity to pay for TV, cable first was educational and ad-free. Now, there’s just as many commercials, and you’re paying for it monthly.
Radio was the same way as TV. Dragnet was sponsored by a cigarette company, Sherlock Holmes by a winemaker. And then there were ad spots. If you listen to terrestrial radio still, you’ll find commercials. I don’t know if any of the satellite providers have started running ads, but I wouldn’t be shocked.
Newspapers before that were ad-filled too. You bought the newspaper knowing that fact. Comic books had (and have!) ads. Magazines are another ad vector.
We’ve been bombarded by ads for so long as a part of media that they blend into the background. And for my own self, yes, the commercials are annoying and I have always pirated or timeshifted to avoid them across all media, but I don’t really feel the same level of hate that I do for the tracking and privacy concerns. People don’t object to advertisements - look at QVC and HSN. What we need to do is shift the conversation away from “ad blocking” over to “privacy protection”.
Traditional advertising whether on a billboard, magazine page, radio, TV are benign afaic, annoying, but benign. Advertising on the internet is an insidious evil because of what is happening behind all those pretty little pictures. Not only are they attempting to sell you product, they are stealing your data to bolster the profits of said company, without giving you due compensation. If my data is so valuable to corporate America, then it’s worth a mint to me and until they cough up the $value$ I determine for my data created with my labor, I’m going to keep as much of my data out of their hands.
I’m old enough to remember the web being primarily text, and turning off automatic image loading being a good way to see fewer ads. I’m old enough to remember popup windows and popup blocking.
I suppose the underlying issue is that if something I don’t like happens on my computer, my first thought is to look for a way to change it, and most people don’t think about computers that way. I’m sad that most people don’t think about computers that way.
Good points.
Similar to the other reply - I haven’t moved to a privacy OS on Android yet because of money.
My fancy Samsung is not supported by those OSs (yet).
That’s entirely reasonable. You can still block most ads if you want to: